“Ungdomshuset (literally “the Youth House”) was the popular name of the building formally named Folkets Hus (“House of the People”) located on Jagtvej 69 in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, which functioned as an underground scene venue for music and rendezvous point for varying anarchist and leftist groups from 1982 until 2007. On 1 March 2007 Ungdomshuset was cleared of its occupants by the police at about 7:00 in the morning, sparking days of intense rioting and giving birth to a widespread social movement that fought for a new space for alternative culture.

“69”, directed and shot by first-time filmmaker Nikolaj Viborg, looks at the dramatic events leading up to the authorities clearing Ungdomshuset on 1 March 2007 and the conflict that ensued. The film recently won the prestigious talent New Nordic Voices award at Nordisk Panorama 2008.”

This is a Free Screening, with possibly a discussion after the end of the film if people who come are interested.

“Around 1000 arrests in Copenhagen Police said they rounded up 968 in a preventive action against a group of youth activists at the tail end of the demonstration. “We saved the demonstration from being disturbed totally,” Per Larsen, chief coordinator for the Danish police, told the New York Times. “There were some hard-core protesters that we have neutralized.”

I. The political: war. Two Parties: that of Order and that of Insurrection.

II. The prophets say we will soon be fighting for clean water. There are already food riots. What better way to set this stage of history than to paint the picture of 1000 potential rioters, neutralized? Anti-globalization activists are not the only ones to fully comprehend the symbolic value of global trade summits. At the first global summit to deal specifically with responses to climate change, the Party of Order demonstrated exactly what the epoch of uncertainty and crisis will mean: counter-insurgency to a T. The police openly stated their objective: “the biggest security operation since World War II,” and accomplished it—militarily—with speed, efficiency, and finesse.

III. Order, securitization, and immunization. From the position of the Party of Order, the crises we currently inhabit are always the results of unknown variables. If these variables were mapped, understood and rationalized, they could be controlled and neutralized. This occurs either by means of inclusion into democratic order or by means of discipline and force. For example, the unconscious self-abolition of honey bees, because of their productive capacity in agribusiness as forced immigrant labor, must be viewed from the position of the Party of Order as a possible threat to the production of food. Even a hurricane must be calculated in terms of its destabilizing effect—as if it were an act of terrorism. At the human level, all labor which has become superfluous must be viewed in its capacity to produce and perform subjectivities. When human beings fail to perform their subjectivities, they are often decomposed or made an example of. This happens through the violence of job-removal, moral-sanctions and murder, but also at the level of biological disciplining of bodies—the deployment of beauty standards, gendering and racial coding—and at the level of preemptive biotechnological assaults through global social networks mapping, biometrics, and proliferation of surveillance. From the position of the Party of Order this is the only course possible because today in the general conditions of absolute social war, there is no way of distinguishing between a docile, hard-working citizen-subject and a potential terrorist.

IV. Between a docile, hard-working citizen-subject and a potential terrorist, there is life; between life and a potential terrorist, there is the police. The Party of Order’s spectacular goal: generate beautiful works of art in which the police are our glorious protagonists—ensuring order, rescuing kittens, and embodying the exceptional desire of civil society to brutalize its excesses every so often. The party of insurrection must make it its objective not only to reverse this, but to generate different, disturbing and self-alienating works of art. The image of static, noise—the pornographic image which deletes its author and model—must be generated in order to inflict a profound violence to the system of meaning which the Party of Order enforces.

V. Even occupation can be rationalized. No tactic should fit in a tool box. The Party of Order is eager to bring an unruly situation to its logical conclusion (see: the second occupation of the New School). The party of insurrection’s appearances must mutate. Either from the application of collective intelligence or by means of simulacrum, each slight alteration in tactical continuity disrupts the predictions of the Party of Order. For example, a shift from all-black everything to black tops, denim bottoms provides slightly easier and hastier withdraw. Attacking where the enemy’s forces are not does not only mean diffused nocturnal sabotage or individuated strikes.

VI. The party of insurrection, if it will refine “the convergence” past its declared expiration date, must develop the intelligence, resources and material solidarities to appear as multiplied, yet vast. It is necessary to be numerous and cruel when engaging in terrain with police. In a city, a few ruined avenues occupied by life is enough to cause a crisis. If by means of destruction, mobility and appropriate technology is nice; if by means of territorialization, then what we must learn is what devices stick, hold on, and endure. The capacity to self-organize and deploy forces—300 rioters here, 300 rioters there and 300 rioters there—which are always reinforcing each other, must be developed. The intelligence which transforms any commodity we may come in contact with into a device of insurrection must be learned. Moreover, the capacity to inflict psychological or emotional harm to an enemy force must be experimented with beyond the practices of passive shaming. This can be advanced either by the development of our own “less than lethal” weapons which counteract the police’s rubber bullets, pepper spray and bean bags, and which perhaps make the molotov obsolete, and/or by means of a different strategy to combat, in which the heart is both the weapon and target.

VII. The next convergence points: unstable cultural events, vulnerable gatherings of the rich, holiday events, reality TV show filmings, the next disaster, celebrity marriages, the deployment of our own doomsday gangs which collectively attack functional subjectivities, our own or otherwise.”

This is an act directed against the political spectacle of COP15 – We are not going to let the charades of the political elite distract us from what we know needs doing. Last night a gas-station was burnt to the ground in the city of Lund in the south of Sweden, just across the bridge from Copenhagen.

Unlike the elite gathering in Copenhagen, we consider the destruction of life a serious matter. While they twist themselves around trying to seem concerned, they are fanning the flames of the fires that have been consuming all life it can for hundreds of years.

The fires we build – and ignite – are those intended to rid ourselves of our shackles and create the space to build the worlds we dream of.

We see no other solution to the situation that industrial capitalism has put us in, than burning down gas-stations and all other monuments holding up this system. We are living in a socio-ecological crisis, and it will remain untill we remove it’s cause.

The Institute for Experimental Freedom’s European appendages and friends are pleased to announce the completed layout for a new text in preparation for the Cop15 summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Introduction to The Apocalypse gives a concise and critical analysis of the current ecological catastrophe, the climate change movement and its limitations, and the real existing potential for an immediate reversal of the future. Copy and distribute freely.

“All of us secretly desire for this world to end. The future lasts forever. Or at least, it used to. The grand illusion of Western civilization has always been the myth of progress, namely that the flow of history would beneficently extend into an infinite future. To our parents, civilization offered houses in the suburbs, computers, and automobiles. And civilization delivered. To the children of these workers, civilization offered life on the moon, artificial intelligence, endless peace. All of which have failed to emerge. While our parents cling to the belief that someday the mortgage will be repaid and they can retire in happiness, their lost children know this is a lie. This world offers nothing to us: no meaningful work, no rest, no future – only fear. Over and over again, we find ourselves conditioned like rats by the images of not just our own death, but of total destruction. From the collapse of the World Trade Center to the alien invasion, from the specter of nuclear war to the hole in the ozone layer – and now the melting glaciers – these images ingrain themselves in our very being. These images are nothing more than modern projections of the deep-set fantasy of all religions: the apocalypse.”

Today, catastrophic climate change is the image of the apocalypse. Nothing has escaped the touch of humanity, from the deepest oceans to the atmosphere itself. There is little doubt that carbon emissions caused by human activity may bring about the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a matter of listening to the ticking of the doomsday clock as it counts down to a climactic apocalypse. Never before in recorded history has the question of the earth’s survival been so starkly posed, and never before has such news been greeted with such indifference.

What is to be done in the face of a crisis so large it dwarfs the imagination? We are left with nothing but a sense of impending doom, a strange depression that keeps us oscillating between hysterical hedonism and sad loneliness, and in the end both responses are merely the two faces of the selfsame despair. Those self-appointed to “save” us from this crisis – the governments, scientists, activists –seem incapable of anything but sloganeering: clean development, carbon markets, sustainable development, climate justice, ecological reparations, green capitalism. We know in our heart of hearts that these fantasies give any sensible person as much cold comfort as a stiff drink. Confronted with the real possibility of the apocalypse, the world becomes inverted: to continue as if everything is normal in the present moment is the most refined act of nihilism.

This generalised delirium, formerly confined to only a handful of activists, has spread over the last few years to the population at large, and even the state seems a sincere believer in catastrophic climate change. Observe the reaction of the nation-states who, while in endless summits to “solve” the climate crisis, such as the COP15, continue to build airport after airport, highway after highway, giving industries the remit to emit ever-more carbon. The nation-states continue to act as if everything is normal, while at the same time lying through their gritted teeth that “we are solving the climate crisis.” No-one today, even the children, believe them. Their summits and pledges are mere fiddling while Rome burns. The absurd plots hatched by scientists to avert this coming apocalypse, from putting mirrors into space to pumping water from the bottom of the ocean, have only the virtue of being at least mildly entertaining. There is a distinct air of madness about our rulers, a madness that reminds us only too much of the monarchs of the ancien regime shortly before their beheading. Yet, what can a single person do? The despair felt when confronted by the reality of climate change is an honest appraisal of a disaster where there is no easy escape. Let us hold this despair close, let it nurture us. Honesty is always the best policy for survival.”